Games · Submitted
Séance
A candlelit talking board built in Rive for the Rive Halloween Challenge. Rest your hand on the glass and ask who's there. A girl called Mimi answers, until the glass spells NOT MIMI.
Rest your hand on the glass. Ask who’s there. A girl called Mimi answers, until the glass spells NOT MIMI.
Séance is a talking board on a candlelit table, with a glass planchette that only moves under your hand. You pick one of the questions under the board, rest your cursor on the glass, and it starts to drift: it circles, heads for a letter, changes its mind, then spirals in and settles. Early on it’s slow and unsure, as if your own hand might be doing it. Answer by answer it gets faster and surer of itself, and by the eighth it’s no longer yours. I’m calling it a talking board because the famous name for one is somebody else’s trademark.
It’s one of my four entries for the Rive Halloween Challenge, and the board, the candles, the smoke and the glass are all drawn live inside the Rive file.
Mimi
The spirit is Mimi. She’s seven, and she’s fairly sure it’s 1816. The story is built on an old legend: a demonology dictionary from 1818 records a girl near Amiens who said three demons called Mimi, Zozo and Crapoulet were inside her, and since 2009 people have been reporting Zozo on their own boards. Ask the right questions and Mimi’s story comes out in pieces. Tell her what year it really is and you find out it wasn’t Mimi you were talking to.
It’s 152 questions in fourteen scenes, each question written three ways, and a question only shows up once the board has told you enough for it to make sense. You can’t ask about the priest before the board has mentioned a priest. The story was worked out backwards from the endings, so every closing line is true on every route that can reach it. Keeping all that straight needed a map.
Reading the room
Every effect means one thing, so you learn to read them. The candles nearly die on a first sign and on threats. While Zozo has the glass the flames burn blue and frost crusts the lens. A figure eight burns its path into the wood and leaves soot behind.
There’s a whole paragraph in my notes about how candle wax runs. It is not a short paragraph. Both candles are drawn live, so the flames sway, flicker and light the board, and the glow in the wax dies with the flame.
Eight ways it ends
The table can go over, the candles can go out, you can get away with a proper goodbye, or something can get out through the glass. When the table goes over, the glass comes at you with something in the lens.
Free to create
Séance was my fourth game this month, and Rive’s free plan hosts three. The command line pushed it to the Editor without complaint, then the publish came back refused, with Upgrade next to every way out. A game about a spirit that won’t leave was stuck in the house. So I paid the nine dollars to let it out.
The other three
The rest of my Halloween entries: Hollow, a pumpkin you really carve, Knock Knock, a peephole you shouldn’t trust, and The Fogged Mirror, a bathroom mirror you shouldn’t clean. All four are in the Rive Halloween Challenge on Contra.
